Canadians Are Boycotting US Ski Slopes

Vermont’s Jay Peak—a ski resort just minutes south of the border with Quebec—has long relied on Canadian visitors to help populate its 81 slopes and trails. In a normal year, the mountain gets more than half its profits from those border-crossing guests. So when Steve Wright, Jay Peak Resort’s president and general manager, saw at the start of summer that Canadian renewals for the 2025-26 season had fallen an alarming 35%, he jumped into action, calling about 100 Canadian season-pass holders to personally ask why they hadn’t made plans to return. As Wright testified before Congress shortly after during a forum on Trump’s trade war: “Many had tears and were choking up over the fact that they just couldn’t, in good conscience, come to the States.”

A similar trend is playing out at US ski resorts from Montana to Maine. Lodging and resort companies are rolling out the hospitality for their northern visitors—marketing steep discounts on bookings, accepting the weaker loonie on par with the dollar and translating more messaging into French—in hopes that travelers from Canada, long the biggest source of international visitors to the US, will put aside their hard feelings toward President Donald Trump and return to the country’s snow parks.